Show Business: The Skin Touch

At first glance, nearly everything seems wrong. The lips are too thick and the nose is too flat, a porcine little button. For a woman who stands only 5 ft. 5 in., the bust is perhaps too heroic, while the stomach is—well —flabby. Yet somehow all the defective parts work together to make Dyan Cannon Hollywood's newest sex star. "She has the skin touch," explains Producer Mike Frankovich. "It's a vibrant sex that goes over so strongly it sets off most men."

Accessibility is the essence of her appeal. The usual Dyan Cannon role is that of the good-hearted slattern, the readily available Miss—or Mrs. —next door. In Doctors' Wives, she was a bored spouse on the prowl for fresh medical talent; in The Love Machine, the nympho consort of the head of a giant TV network; in The Anderson Tapes, a high-class prostitute. Now Otto Preminger's Such Good Friends (TIME, Jan. 10) has her bedding down with her dying husband's best friends—how else is a girl going to cope with the discovery of her mate's past infidelities?

Until recently, Dyan's best-known part was that of Gary Grant's fourth ex-wife and the mother of his only child, five-year-old Jennifer. Born in the mid-'30s—she refuses to give her exact age —Samille Diane Friesen grew up in Seattle, the daughter of a Baptist father and a Jewish mother. After 18 months of drama courses at the University of Washington, she left for Hollywood. Eventually she tested for Producer Jerry Wald who gave her her stage name.

"I see something explosive," said Wald. "Terrific! Bang! Cannon!"

At this point in her career, Dyan went into TV soap operas, which, she says, "taught me how to relax in front of a camera and how to work fast. I acted everything from committing murder to selling Girl Scout cookies, and I even had to read speeches while sets fell on me." Her performance in a TV film entitled—what else?—The Diane Adventure caught Grant's eye and prompted him to audition her for one of his movies. She lost the part (the picture was never produced), but gained a husband —eventually. She and Grant lived together for about four years before her "uptight" feelings about not being married led to a wedding, over his reservations, in 1965.

Less than three years later they split up in one of Hollywood's messier divorces, with Dyan charging that Grant was a weekly LSD tripper who beat her in front of the servants and tried to "remake" her. "He changed the way I wore my hair, my makeup, my speech and my clothes," she says. "If I hadn't divorced him, I'd be dead by now."